1. Technical Field
The invention relates to a slit forming process, a manufacturing process of an electron emission element, and an electronic device.
2. Related Art
An electron emission element equipped with a pair of element electrodes, which are arranged opposite to each other on an insulating substrate, and a conductive thin film provided connectingly with the element electrodes is known. As an example, there is an electron emission element made public by M. I. Elinson in Radio Eng. Electron Phys., 120, 1290 (1965).
Forming a conductive thin film in such electron emission element is normally conducted by a process mainly consisting of a semiconductor process such as a vacuum evaporation process, etching, and liftoff. However, such process calls for specialized, expensive manufacturing equipment. Since it requires a plurality of steps associated with patterning, there is a problem of high production cost particularly in case of forming numerous electron emission elements for a large substrate.
Against this background, there is proposed a process (hereinafter referred to as the “inkjet process”) of forming a conductive thin film without employing a semiconductor process, by using an inkjet device and coating a liquid material (hereinafter referred to as the “conductive material”), which includes metallic elements for forming the conductive thin film, upon a substrate (for example, refer to the first example of related art.)
FIG. 7 is a diagram showing a manufacturing process of an electron emission element according to the inkjet process.
First, a pair of element electrodes 21 and 22 is formed on a substrate 20 by using photolithography and the like (refer to FIG. 7A). Next, a conductive material is coated between the element electrodes 21 and 22 by using the inkjet device, then, subjected to heating and baking, thus forming a conductive thin film 30 connected to the element electrodes 21 and 22 (refer to FIG. 7B). And, an electron emission element is formed by applying a continuity process (hereinafter referred to as the “forming process”) called forming to the conductive thin film 30 to cause the conductive thin film to generate an nanometric size slit and the like (refer to FIG. 7C).
JP-A-2004-192812 is an example of related art.
Now, it is necessary to control a position of a slit 40 in precision to obtain a uniform property in regard to a plurality of electron emission elements formed on the substrate 20, while there was an extremely difficult problem of finely controlling the position of the slit 40 by means of the forming process.